Loading...Every trip is complicated in its own way. Even a weekend junket to Albuquerque for the Seder involves buying 3oz containers of fluids, checking in online, rolling up pairs of jeans in a carry-on bag and figuring out what to put on my iPod. No matter how ordinary a trip is or how many times I’ve made it, I can never quite imagine myself being there & there is always the panicky rush to tie up loose ends before the trip to the airport.
Each year, my dad and I spend some time before the Seder finding a new angle for the Seder- figuring out what we’re going to focus on, how we will tell the timeless story of liberation and what new perspective we’ll bring to it to enrich our understanding of the holiday and of our heritage. While it’s been a long time since I was someone who could be considered by any definition a practicing Jew, I look forward to this opportunity to engage my mind in revisiting the story and my taste-buds in revisiting the old rituals. In some ways, the Seder is the perfect expression of being Jewish- it is existential- rooted in behavior rather than meditation, sensory as well as intellectual and most of all communal. Not only an opportunity to come together, but the obligation to come together, to share the story, the collective memory of liberation experienced through generations of shared ritual. The gefilte fish may come out of a jar not a bathtub and we may have added green chilli chicken stew to the menu, but the basic flavor elements, the sequence of the meal, the wise-cracks as stale as old Matzoh, all of it is shared with past generations as well as present companions. We open the door and joke about how Elijah doesn’t come, but because we are willing still to open the door, we let in those who have come before us, those we’ve lost for good and those we always keep in the back of our minds hoping for a long delayed reunion, those who are too far away and those who are too sick or to come. At the end, we make a wish- next year in Jerusalem, next year we’ll be free, next year we’ll be together- and in the simple act of making the wish with an open heart we make it come true just a little bit.
